Eve Plumb played Jan Brady, the middle sister on The Brady Bunch. She was baptized in a movie theater that doubled as a church on Sundays, and she started her professional acting career at the age of six. She had done more than 40 commercials and at least a dozen TV shows (including three different episodes, playing three different girls, on The Big Valley) before she was cast as Jan Brady. She had also performed with the Jimmy Joyce Children's Chorus, a well-known musical troupe that recorded "High Hopes" with Doris Day a few years before Plumb joined, and recorded "Sing (Sing A Song)" with The Carpenters a few years after she left.

On The Brady Bunch, Jan is often remembered as "the disturbed" girl, but there were really only a few episodes where she fit that description. Jan once made up an imaginary boyfriend, and in another episode she memorably moaned, "All day long at school I hear how great Marcia is at this or how wonderful Marcia did that! Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!"

After her Brady years, Plumb went on to be homecoming queen in high school, and performed with The Groundlings comedy troupe for several years. Fellow Groundling Lisa Kudrow advised her to dye her hair dark, dark red, to help erase the image of Jan Brady, and it helped change audiences' expectations.

When a reporter asked her, many years after The Brady Bunch ended, which episode was her favorite, the sharp-tongued Plumb replied, "The last one." For that wisecrack, she has often been portrayed as wanting nothing to do with the show. She was the only original Brady to turn down the singing-and-dancing Brady Bunch Hour, but in retrospect that may have been wise. She has appeared in most of the other reunion shows, but unlike Barry Williams (who played Greg and has made Brady nostalgia the driving force of his adult career) Plumb thinks of The Brady Bunch as a job she had for several years, several decades ago.

She continues to work as a professional actress on stage, and occasionally in movies and television. On the 1990s kids show Fudge, based on the books of Judy Blume, Plumb played the mom. She has also made irregular appearances on All My Children, and done voiceover work in ads for California tourism.